Tag Archives: Cook

March 14, 2014 · 8:52 am

Doing Your Mies

Beth via Flickr

I realized as I thought about our Foodie Friday topic for this week that I’ve neglected to write about the most basic, and important, step in cooking. Turns out that it’s a pretty important business subject too. That step is doing one’s mise en place. It’s a French term that means “to put in place” and sounds like “meez  en plahse”. No professional kitchen would dream of opening for the evening without the mise having been done. No other business should either.

Doing your mise means you cut up your onions, mice your garlic, and get all the other ingredients for your dish ready before you start to cook.  It has the added benefit of showing you right away if you have all the components necessary to make your recipe or if you need to rethink your plan.  It means you heat up the pan or turn on the grill so it’s hot before you begin.  When I’m cooking a number of dishes, I do all of the mise at once.  That step allows me to cook the dishes without worrying if my timing will be upset by having to slice or dice some forgotten element. It’s the only way that a restaurant kitchen can crank out dozens of dishes in a reasonable time period.  After all, can you imagine how long you’d be sitting if the cooks had to dice onions or search for a carrot in the middle of the evening rush?

You should be doing mise in the office as well.  Starting the day by taking the time to mentally prepare yourself and your staff for the day’s tasks may seem like an unnecessary waste of time but it helps avoid a lot of crisis situations.  A manager’s job is to make sure his team has what they need to do their jobs and doing the mise by walking around first thing is a good step in that direction.  Diving right in to email is like turning on the stove before you’ve brought the protein up to room temp first and making sure you have the sauce components ready to go.  The pieces of the day won’t go together nearly as well.  Most people’s minds are clear first thing in the morning.  That’s the time to prep.

Everyone knows “Ready, Fire, Aim” is a bad idea in business and in the kitchen.  Doing your mise is both “ready” and “aim”.   It assures that the great product you have in mind is what you produce in the end.  Make sense?

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January 17, 2014 · 11:06 am

The Stuff On The Bottom

Let’s end the week with some Foodie Friday Fond Fun.

English: Fond left in a white enamel pot after...

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

What is fond, you ask? A food scientist would tell you it’s the residue on the bottom of the pan left over when you sauté meats or vegetables. It’s the browned stuff that forms from either caramelization of sugars or from something called the Maillard Reaction. I’d tell you it’s yummy goodness.

Every good cook knows that you never toss this stuff.  It’s the base for most good pan sauces and at a minimum you want to use it in whatever else you’re going to be doing with what you cooked to create the reside in the first place.  The addition of a little wine or stock or even water will release the fond and that process is called deglazing.  You can then use the resulting liquid either to make a sauce (add butter and seasonings) or as the base for anything from gravy to soup.  Whatever you do, you never want to discard it

That principle applies to business as well.  There are a number of very successful companies that are built on the residue of other business activities.  Think about how many times you read about “unsuccessful” brands being sold off or failing businesses being bought to be turned around, reinvigorated, or repositioned to yield better results.  Those things are the fond of business and private equity firms have learned to deglaze those opportunities into excellent profits.

We do that to people too sometimes.  An employee is not producing as they once did or maybe a smart person with excellent skills is burned out.  Rather than discarding them we should be thinking about what we can add – the deglazing liquid – to bring them back to life and transform them into a more productive, happier person.  Maybe it’s a role change or maybe it’s a different sort of challenge.  Like fond, discarding them is a waste of something that can be quite good.

The next time you cook something in a pan, think about how the stuff on the bottom of the pan will be used.  When you get the chance, you might give some thought to recognizing and using it in the office as well.  Yum!

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November 27, 2013 · 10:54 am

On Time And Hot

While today isn’t Foodie Friday, it is a major food day here at the world headquarters.

Thanksgiving at the Trolls

(Photo credit: martha_chapa95)

Cooking in earnest for tomorrow’s Thanksgiving feast begins.  With that in mind, I want to revisit a post I did almost five years ago that talks about how one gets a massive project – dinner for 20+ – completed on time with all dishes hot.  As I said at the time,  Thanksgiving‘s biggest challenge is time.

“Time?” you’re thinking, “that’s the biggest challenge?”  I’m sure you could put together a list of this week’s challenges which would contain items such as where to stash all the coats, how to fit 25 people around a table made for 12, and how to step over Uncle Elmer to get to the bathroom without waking him up.  However, as the conductor of the Thanksgiving orchestra around old Rancho Deluxe here, let me assure you that the primary challenge of the day is delivering all 39 items on the menu to the table at the same time, appropriately hot or cold as required.

The key to the entire day is a timed checklist.  Seriously.  I take an enormous amount of crap from everyone who sees mine each year until they realize that the meal is being served at exactly the time requested by the Mrs. which happens to coincide nicely with halftime of the football game.  This list is created by using back timing – something TV and radio producers do all the time.  Beginning at the desired end time and factoring in the availability of necessary facilities (ovens, stove burners, etc.), you work backwards and piece together the time required for each dish until you have a road map.  Anything I can knock off ahead of time (baking, prepping all the dressings, parboiling vegetables) is done up to 24 hours in advance.  It even gets down to resting time for the turkeys before carving and the time it takes for the oil to heat up in the fryer.  In fact, we started frying the turkeys in part because it frees up an oven late in the process.  This sounds like a silly bit of overkill to get the meal ready, but it prevents you from leaving the soup in the refrigerator or forgetting you were serving carrots and finding a 20lb bag the next morning.  Which is the business point as well.

Any project needs to start at the end and work backwards.  You take into account the resources you need along with the human resources to produce the final product.  You need to be honest about the time each step will take and once you’ve written each element down along with its appropriate time block you need to keep checking the list to be sure you’re on time every step of the way.  My list even has lunch and shower time scheduled so nothing is overlooked.

I’d be happy to share my list with you but it really would only help you with your dinner a bit.  The cooking facilities here are pretty damn good although we spent the money on them instead of indoor toilets (kidding).  As with every project, you have to tie your back-timed list to the list of desired outcomes, the facilities you have available to you, and your own skills, whether in the kitchen or in the office.

Make sense?

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